Israel -- The First Electric Car Nation?

On Jan. 21, 2008 Renault-Nissan President and Chief Executive Carlos
Ghosn announced in Jerusalem that they will begin producing a
customized electric car for the Israeli market in 2011. The idea is the
brainchild of former SAP executive Shah Agassi's, who formed a venture
specifically for this project, name Project Better Place, based in Palo
Alto, California. The five passenger Renault Megane will serve as a
prototype vehicle.
Initially, up to 20,000 such cars will be produced. To celebrate,
Renault staffers recently converted a gasoline car to electric, and
according to Israeli news reports, it even raced against a gasoline
car. Dozens will hit the road at the end of 2008 as demonstrations.

Israel
was apparently chosen because it was an ideal testing ground for the
electric car. Ninety percent of automobile owners drive fewer than 70km
(43.5 miles) per day, and the country's main cities are within 150km
(93 miles) of each other.

What’s interesting in this new development is that Israel is not a hotbed of environmentalism. Environmental awareness is low and environmental regulations are uncommon in this country. Instead, ending foreign oil dependency is in their best interest. The
Israeli government has thrown its support behind the project, by
helping to make the economics of electric car work. On Jan 13th, 2008,
the Cabinet approved a proposal to tax new cars based on their
emissions levels. Regular new cars will be taxed 79%, hybrids 30%, and
zero-emission electric vehicles 10%. This favorable rate will
disappear gradually over time and as market share increases, the
typical way where government subsidy can be used to encourage adoption
of a beneficial technology to create enough demand to make large-scale
production eventually viable.

However, don’t cheer too fast –
for the Israeli grid is not very clean. This proposal will increase
greenhouse gas emission until the grid uses more renewable sources of
energy. Currently, Israel has a policy to produce (only) 10% of its
electricity from solar and wind by 2020. Still, consolidating emission
from point-source such as cars to large power plants is a good idea, as
it will make it easier to tackle the issue of GHG emission. E.g. it is
easier to apply pressure to a large polluter than to persuade millions
of car users to switch to clean cars.

To circumvent battery life
issue, a completely different re-charging model will be used. Better
Place will create and maintain a chain of service stations where owners
can pull in and wait 10 minutes, while technicians swap out the battery
with a fully-charged one. This is about twice the time it takes to
fuel up today so it will be interesting to see how what consumer
reactions are. Still, I am willing to wait 10-15 minutes at my car
wash, because it is so entertaining to watch and they have great
bbq/popcorn… there are definitely ways around it. Ever heard of how
they installed mirrors at elevator banks because people used to
complain those cars took a long time to arrive? Yeah, well, the
complaints stopped once we had a chance to preen. Smile.

This
is definitely news worth getting excited about. An entire nation
deciding to go electric! Now that’s something. Imagine a clean-grid
state like California doing the same. Perhaps smog in LA can be a
distant memory someday. I will keep on dreaming.. after all, good news
like this Israeli development are becoming more common each day.